Mill, Life as Art, and Problems of Self-Description in an Industrial Age

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Mill, Life as Art, and Problems of Self-Description in an Industrial Age COLIN HEYDT

Alan Ryan concludes The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill with the following sentences:

And, however much at odds it sometimes is with his determinist universe, Mill’s concern with self-development and moral progress is a strand in his philosophy to which almost everything else is subordinate. And this is why, once we have established the rational society, scientifi cally understood, controlled according to utilitarian principles, the goals we aim at transcend these, and can only be described as the freely pursued life of personal nobility—the establishment of the life of the individual as a work of art. 1

Ryan does not say what it would mean to think about life as a work of art. Then again, neither does Mill. That is not to claim that Ryan imposes something on Mill that is not there—far from it. After all, the last department of the “Art of Life” is aesthetics, which covers “the Beautiful or Noble . . . in human conduct and works.” 2 And Mill consistently employs aesthetic cate-gories when treating the self. Late in his life, for example, in an address delivered to the students of the University of St. Andrews, Mill exhorted his audience to think of life in aesthetic terms: “Art, when really cultivated, and not merely practised empirically, maintains, what it fi rst gave the concep-tion of, an ideal Beauty, to be eternally aimed at, though surpassing what can be actually attained; and by this idea it trains us never to be completely satisfi ed with imperfection in what we ourselves do and are: to idealize, as much as possible, every work we do, and most of all, our own characters and

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Mill, Life as Art, and Problems of Self-Description 265

lives.” 3 This revisits a theme that can be found throughout his work, most famously in chapter 3 of On Liberty , where Mill claims: “It really is of impor-tance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in per-fecting and beautifying, the fi rst in importance surely is man himself.” 4

Though Mill often speaks of life in aesthetic terms, it is hard to know what he means by it. Is it merely a loose and suggestive metaphor? In this essay, I strive to make this way of speaking more concrete and open to philosophical analysis. I begin by situating this language within Victorian con-cerns about the growth of industrial modernity. Like many Romantics, Mill thinks art can mitigate the negative effects of industrial modernity, which he identifi ed as selfi shness, limitations on self-development, and a concomitant loss of general utility. I move on to Mill’s aesthetic writings in order to charac-terize an aesthetic attitude simpliciter. This shows, in turn, that to take an aesthetic attitude toward one’s own life demands that one redescribe oneself and others, thereby supplying a novel context within which to evaluate, delib-erate, and act. In particular, it requires that one describe one’s life as within something larger, nobler, and longer lasting, because, according to Mill, the individual life would otherwise fail to fi re the imagination. Comte’s Religion of Humanity intrigues Mill because it suggests a particularly poetic and effec-tive self-description, namely, that one is a participant in the “great epic” of humanity, which terminates “in the happiness or misery, the elevation or deg-radation, of the human race.” 5 Mill contends that this redescription of the self results in a new sense of the importance of life, combats despair and selfi sh-ness, and cultivates aspects of moral character (e.g., fellow-feeling) essential for the realization of utilitarian ends. I conclude by identifying some of the causes (personal and social) that sustain and make these new self-descriptions possible and by showing that we can see Mill’s thought in illuminating and unfamiliar ways when we consider his views on life as art.

1. Life as Art

In his 1867 inaugural address given to the University of St. Andrews, Mill offers the following counsel:

The more prosaic our ordinary duties, the more necessary it is to keep up the tone of our minds by frequent visits to that higher region of thought and feeling, in which every work seems dignifi ed in proportion to the ends for which, and the spirit in which, it is done; where we learn, while eagerly seizing every opportunity of exercising higher faculties and performing higher duties, to regard all useful and honest work as a public function, which may be ennobled by the mode of performing it—which has not properly any other nobility than what that gives—and which, if

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266 JOHN STUART MILL AND THE ART OF LIFE

ever so humble, is never mean but when it is meanly done, and when the motives from which it is done are mean motives. 6

This soaring exhortation also implies a warning—this passage cautions against lives whose purposes remain limited to survival, both physical and social. For Mill, as for other Victorian observers, the advent of industrial modernity presented particular challenges in this respect and often con-tributed to making life more narrow and base than it should be.

Radical change in the economy and in the way in which Britons lived occurred throughout Mill’s life. Though historians debate the appropriate-ness of the term “Industrial Revolution” and wonder whether there was, in fact, more continuity than discontinuity between the early eighteenth century and 1780–1850, some changes were clearly signifi cant and unprecedented, with perhaps the most obvious being growth in population, rapid urbaniza-tion, and the transformation brought by the railroad in how British people traveled, where they worked, and what goods they consumed and sold. 7

How far had humanity benefi ted from the wealth, technological change, massed populations, habits of coordinated social activities, and administration of justice that Mill thought distinguished civilized societies from barbaric ones? 8 Mill contended that the positions of the two sides on this controversy were right in what they affi rmed and wrong in what they denied:

One observer is forcibly struck by the multiplication of physical comforts; the advancement and diffusion of knowledge; the decay of superstition; . . . the soft-ening of manners; the decline of war and personal confl ict; . . . and he becomes that very common character, the worshipper of “our enlightened age.” Another fi xes his attention, not upon the value of these advantages, but upon the high price which is paid for them; the relaxation of individual energy and courage; the loss of proud and self-relying independence; the slavery of so large a portion of mankind to artifi cial wants; their effeminate shrinking from even the shadow of pain; the dull unexciting monotony of their lives, and the passionless insipidity, and absence of any marked individuality, in their characters. . . . 9

Though Mill, unlike many conservative critics of urbanization and industrial-ization, consistently held that “civilization is a good, that it is the cause of much good, and not incompatible with any,” he nevertheless thought those who denied the negative effects of civilization naïve, mistaken, or lacking in good faith. 10 Much of Mill’s intellectual labor involved discovering the ways in which the benefi ts of civilization could be preserved and furthered while mit-igating the real disadvantages noted by the critics of “our enlightened age.”

Among the particular effects of industrial modernity that Mill was par-ticularly keen to lessen included strong tendencies in modern British society that inhibited regard for others, diminished individual happiness,

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and reduced the agency we exercise over our own lives. Mill’s 1840 essay on De Toqueville nicely brings out these concerns:

The private money-getting occupation of almost every one is more or less a mechanical routine; it brings but few of his faculties into action, while its exclusive pursuit tends to fasten his attention and interest exclusively upon himself, and upon his family as an appendage of himself; making him indifferent to the public, to the more generous objects and the nobler interests, and, in his inordinate regard for his personal comforts, selfi sh and cowardly. 11

Along with noting that economic routine tends to limit the scope of one’s attention to the world, Mill hearkens here to the prevalent Victorian meta-phor of man as machine—a metaphor usually employed in making the claim that commercial society turns the worker into a machine. 12 The divi-sion of labor, the growing size of factories and businesses (with the related depersonalization of work), the increasing simplicity and repetitiveness of the work, in other words, the cornerstones of much of the economic suc-cess of modern Britain, all contributed to spiritual deadening—a limitation of emotional and imaginative reach or scope. 13

This concern to address the mechanization of human beings also refl ects a desire in Mill to parry some of the most common and rhetorically effective criticisms against utilitarianism, namely, that utilitarians exem-plify, as Carlyle puts it, the values of this “Mechanical Age . . . the Age of Machinery.” 14 Indeed, this criticism often came to be leveled at Mill him-self. Mill recounts that his good friend John Sterling had, before knowing Mill well, accepted a common opinion that Mill was “a ‘made’ or manufac-tured man”—that is, manufactured by his father and Bentham, the leaders of the utilitarian movement. 15

Victorian anxiety about the impact of industrial modernity turns out to be an essential context within which to understand Mill’s views on aes-thetics and on life as art because some of the most important justifi cations for cultivating an aesthetic approach to life depended on claims that this approach could diminish the problems produced and/or exacerbated by civilization. To let industrial modernity structure how we evaluate ourselves and others would compromise our humanity and the potential within it.

2. The Poetic Attitude

In what follows, I examine two of Mill’s most important statements on aes-thetics and his qualifi ed endorsement of a Comtean Religion of Humanity in order to show, fi rst, what it means to perceive objects aesthetically and, second, what it means to take ourselves as aesthetic objects—to take our lives as works of art.

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A. Wordsworth and Mill

In the best known of Mill’s writings on aesthetics, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” he argues, explicitly following Wordsworth, for an expressiv-ist theory of art, which contends that the aesthetic value of art is constituted by the emotional self-expression of the artist, the overfl ow of which leads to the creation of the work. 16 More important for our purposes, however, Mill also accepts the Wordsworthian opposition between the love of art and “a craving for extraordinary incident,” in order to note differences in how people attend to, and delight in, their worlds. 17 This opposition indicates two fundamentally different comportments toward the world, which he names the “poetic” and the “novelistic” (a distinction that demarcates the artistic from the quotidian rather than one genre from another). The dispo-sitions toward each type of enjoyment are rarely found together in one person: “a really strong passion for either of the two, seems to presuppose or to superinduce a comparative indifference to the other.” 18 Mill’s favor for the poetic over the novelistic, and for the poetic person over the novelistic person, comes out in the following important passage:

The sort of persons whom not merely in books but in their lives, we fi nd perpetu-ally engaged in hunting for excitement from without, are invariably those who do not possess, either in the vigor of their intellectual powers or in the depth of their sensibilities, that which would enable them to fi nd ample excitement nearer at home. The same persons whose time is divided between sight-seeing, gossip, and fashionable dissipation, take a natural delight in fi ctitious narrative; the excitement it affords is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so, because they relish novels in verse. But poetry, which is the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of the human heart, is interesting only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been different. 19

Three things need to be noted here. First of all, though Mill is one of the great Victorian feminists, we should not pass this text by without recog-nizing that, in this period, “novel-reader” brought with it strong connota-tions of frivolous femininity. The “poetic” thereby gains some of its rhetorical cache through opposition with the womanly.

Second, and related to the fi rst point, while the poetic excites interest on the basis of its earnest exploration of the depths of feeling, the novelistic depends upon interest aroused through incident. For Mill, the capacity to take interest in feeling and thought—that is, a capacity to take an interest in working through how we feel and think about an object presented in the medium of art—is superior to our willingness to be entertained by inci-dent. Whereas novelistic incident serves to keep us from boredom, poetry

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(which can be found in paintings, prose, and plays as well as in verse) engages us by turning us inward so that we can discover the adventures inherent in thought and passion. Along with richer pleasure, poetry thereby provides us with insight into human psychology—an insight he took the Benthamite accounts to lack and that led them to ignore the “deeper and more secret workings of the human heart.” 20

Finally, this text exemplifi es the emphasis throughout Mill’s aesthetic writings on the connection between art and the development of interiority. It is through the development of interiority (“individuality” in the language of On Liberty ), that is, through the development of intellectual and affective resources, that we can resist the homogenizing effects of the culture of commercial modernity (including the “tyranny of the majority”). Ultimately, aesthetic experience contributes to the capacity of the individual to distance herself from society while also opening up new, often unconventional pos-sibilities for how to evaluate and conduct her life—or, at the least, leading her to affi rm the conventional choices she has made as truly her own rather than as merely responses to societal pressures.

But how does aesthetic experience produce this distancing and the opening of imaginative possibility? In order to address this question, Mill draws on the aesthetic theory of John Ruskin.

B. Ruskin and Mill

In 1869, Mill edited and reissued his father’s An Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind . Throughout, he contributed (along with Alexander Bain) detailed editorial notes commenting on his father’s views. Among those notes are some of Mill’s most interesting statements about aesthetics, in which he suggests that his father’s writing about beauty suffers from its reliance on the theories of Archibald Alison, the author of Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste . Mill, alternatively, had the benefi t of being able to draw from “a deeper thinker than Alison,” namely, John Ruskin, the great Victorian champion of the moral importance of art: “Mr. Ruskin, with profounder and more thoughtful views respecting the beauties both of Nature and of Art than any psychologist I could name, undertakes, in the second volume of Modern Painters [1846] to investigate the conditions of Beauty.” 21 Ruskin is, in Mill’s judgment, “to a very considerable degree suc-cessful in making out his case” concerning beauty.

Ruskin’s case opens through identifying two varieties of beauty, which Ruskin terms “typical” and “vital.” Vital beauty is “the appearance of felici-tous fulfi llment of function in living things, more especially of the joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man.” 22 Typical beauties, which are of more immediate concern for us, express divine perfections (i.e., various “ideas of

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beauty”) in material form. For example, Ruskin argues that symmetry expresses the idea of divine justice, and repose suggests divine permanence. The diffuse light of “the declining or breaking day” or of the luminous sky in a landscape suggests infi nity and thereby embodies the “divine incomprehensiblity.” 23 The mind seeks out such light with “a deeper feeling of the beautiful . . . a deeper feeling, I say, not perhaps more acute, but having more of spiritual hope and longing, less of animal and present life.” 24 By fi nd-ing God’s perfections in nature and art, the spectator transitions from his limited, sensuous, animal nature to something divine and transcendent. 25

Though Mill objected to Ruskin’s metaphysics and theology, and though he was more a devotee of poetry than painting, he thought Ruskin’s emphasis on beauty arising from recognition of perfections expressed in nature and art was fundamentally correct. Moreover, Ruskin’s stress on the moral urgency of aesthetic experience, criticism, and artistic creation resonated with Mill. The study of art and nature, as Ruskin puts it, “is no recreation; it cannot be learned at spare moments, nor pursued when we have nothing better to do. It is no handiwork for drawing-room tables; no relief of the ennui of bou-doirs; it must be understood and undertaken seriously or not at all.” 26

With the requisite earnestness, Mill draws from Ruskin to offer an account of our experience of beauty. Though Mill is not explicit on this point, there seem to be three ways in which something may produce aesthetic pleasure. The fi rst would be through sensation itself, anterior to association. Mill recalls “the intense and mysterious delight which in early childhood I had in the colours of certain fl owers; a delight far exceeding any I am now capable of receiving from colour of any description, with all its acquired associations.” 27 There is a “direct element of physical pleasure” that color, sound, taste, and smell, can provide and that precedes any plea-sures derived from association.

A second form of pleasure is that of agreeableness. This type of plea-sure arises principally through association of the aesthetic object with simple, commonplace things that satisfy our most basic needs. As Mill argues, the state of consciousness constituted by the associations of commonplace and everyday pleasures will not have as elevated a character as a state “made up of reminiscences of such ideas as Mr. Ruskin specifi es, and of the grand and interesting objects and thoughts connected with ideas like those.” 28 The former state of consciousness demands no particularly rare or deep affective capacity to enjoy.

Lastly, those elements of the aesthetic object that elicit the pleasures of beauty “appeal to other, and what we are accustomed, not without meaning, to call higher, parts of our nature; which give a stronger stimulus and a deeper delight to the imagination, because the ideas they call up are such as in themselves act on the imagination with greater force.” 29 Here, then, Mill

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draws on Ruskin’s ideas of beauty, particularly the notion of typical beauty. Our awareness of the ideas of beauty (infi nity, symmetry, unity, etc.), though often “vague and confused,” makes the pleasure of beauty possible.

But what, inquires Mill, is so unusual about ideas of beauty? Why couldn’t other ideas also elicit feelings of beauty? With the exception of infi nity, which, by suggesting power or magnitude without limit, “acquires an otherwise strange impressiveness to the feelings and imagination,” the ideas of beauty “all represent to us some valuable or delightful attribute, in a completeness and perfection of which our experience presents us with no example, and which therefore stimulates the active power of the imagina-tion to rise above known reality, into a more attractive or a more majestic world.” 30 This means that we see or feel, more or less vaguely, the objects embodying these ideas as expressing aspects of human or natural perfec-tion. 31 Our imaginative encounter with these perfections produces dis-tinctly aesthetic pleasures.

“Lower pleasures,” on the contrary, including pleasures of agreeable-ness, do not stimulate the imagination “to rise above known reality”:

To them there is a fi xed limit at which they stop: or if, in any particular case, they do acquire, by association, a power of stirring up ideas greater than themselves, and stimulate the imagination to enlarge its conceptions to the dimensions of those ideas, we then feel that the lower pleasure has, exceptionally, risen into the region of the aesthetic, and has superadded to itself an element of pleasure or a character and quality not belonging to its own nature. 32

A lower pleasure, like those tied to the sensation of rich colors, or the comfort implied by a warm hearth, does not provoke us beyond our “known reality.” 33

Taking an aesthetic stance toward an object, then, depends upon the imagination taking us from the prose of the quotidian to the poetry of the ideal. For Mill, it is this movement of the imagination—explained by Ruskin—that accounts for the valuable features of aesthetic experience, namely, its capacity to distance us from the everyday and to open up new possibilities for what we and the world can be.

I would now like to show in more detail what it means to take one’s life as an aesthetic object—to view one’s life as a work of art—by investigating Mill’s appropriation of Comte’s Religion of Humanity.

C. Embodying the Poetic Attitude Toward Life: The Religion of Humanity

The “philosophic radicals,” with Bentham and James Mill at their head, consis-tently attacked Christianity, both for its incoherencies of doctrine and for its pernicious social effects. 34 Among Christianity’s negative effects was one that

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particularly exercised utilitarians, namely, the religion’s indifference or hos-tility to happiness in this world, which impeded necessary social and political reform. Christian churches (particularly the Anglicans) thereby allied them-selves with the privileged classes to limit the power of the masses.

Though Mill grants in his essay “Theism” that the argument from design offers support for the existence of God (while at the same time leav-ing open the possibility that Darwin’s newly published work might under-mine that argument), he criticized religion throughout his life. 35 He repudiates the evidence of revelation and the conception of God as all pow-erful and perfectly benevolent. Moreover, in “Utility of Religion” he argues that Christianity weakens the intellect by asking its adherents to accept its fl awed theology, promotes selfi shness by appealing to self-interest when emphasizing heaven and hell, and places questionable moral exemplars before its believers, including a God who seems to act arbitrarily by keeping salvation from the millions ignorant of Christ. 36

Nevertheless, unlike Bentham and many of his followers, Mill took reli-gion as meeting, however imperfectly, genuine ethical needs. In “Utility of Religion,” Mill identifi es one of these needs as our “craving for higher things.” 37 This craving originates from the recognition that this world—in which one fi nds the suffering of innocents, injustice, and human relations constituted by “cash payment” (as Carlyle famously put it)—is badly fl awed. 38 We are prone, therefore, to entertain hopes for something better: “Belief in a God or Gods, and in a life after death, becomes the canvas which every mind, according to its capacity, covers with such ideal pictures as it can either invent or copy. In that other life each hopes to fi nd the good which he has failed to fi nd on earth, or the better which is suggested to him by the good which on earth he has partially seen and known.” 39 Religion relies on the imagination to offer ideal pictures of another world that shows us that this imperfect world is not the only one that we can inhabit. It offers “ideal conceptions grander and more beautiful than we see realized in the prose of human life,” thereby elevating our feelings and acting as a source of personal satisfac-tion. 40 Religion, in other words, can ennoble us and save us from despair.

Mill identifi es the problem he faces in a very important passage:

The value . . . of religion to the individual both in the past and present, as a source of personal satisfaction and of elevated feelings, is not to be disputed. But it still has to be considered, whether in order to obtain this good, it is necessary to travel beyond the boundaries of the world which we inhabit; or whether the idealization of our earthly life, the cultivation of a high conception of what it may be made, is not capable of supplying a poetry, and, in the best sense of the word, a religion, equally fi tted to exalt the feelings, and (with the same aid from education) still better calculated to ennoble the conduct, than any belief respecting the unseen powers. 41

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So, on the one hand, Mill takes seriously and wants to address the despair and selfi shness fostered by industrial modernity. On the other hand, he wants to offer a naturalistic alternative to the traditional religion many rely on in the face of this “mechanical” modernity—an alternative that main-tains the benefi ts of traditional religion while ridding it of the dangers posed by its implicit immorality and its robust metaphysics. He ultimately fi nds this alternative in the poetic attitude of the Religion of Humanity that takes us beyond “the prose of human life.”

Yet, Mill’s problem is deeper than needing to present a pretty picture of humanity. This picture must also contain the capacity to motivate. The imagination, in other words, needs to provide us with a description of our lives that attracts us. And it must also be a description that we can sustain, even when confronted with the grind of the everyday and the attractions of traditional religion.

This need for a motivating description leads Mill to imagine an objec-tion to his view. Wouldn’t it be the case that “the small duration, the small-ness and insignifi cance of life, if there is no prolongation of it beyond what we see, makes it impossible that great and elevated feelings can connect themselves with anything laid out on so small a scale”? 42 In other words, wouldn’t our individual lives, taken outside the narrative of eternal salva-tion or damnation, fail to genuinely satisfy our craving for higher things? Wouldn’t life considered naturalistically appear uninspiring, even ugly, such that we would not want to describe ourselves in that way?

In order to fi nd something to satisfy our imaginations, Mill agrees, we cannot depend upon an individual life limited by death. Rather, we need to situate that life within something larger that will continue on. But rather than turn to God’s providence for a meaningful context for the individual life, Mill draws our attention to humanity at large: “Let it be remembered that if individual life is short, the life of the human species is not short; its indefi nite duration is practically equivalent to endlessness; and being combined with indefi nite capability of improvement, it offers to the imagi-nation and sympathies a large enough object to satisfy any reasonable demand for grandeur of aspiration.” 43

It is this idea that the single life can be made beautiful and engaging to the imagination—that life can be aestheticized—by being described within the context of humanity at large, which makes Comte’s somewhat strange notion of the Religion of Humanity attractive to Mill. In order for life to be turned into a work of art that sustainably attracts us, however, two condi-tions must be met.

First, humanity must be idealized. Comte emphasizes that “humanity” should not be understood as simply the mass of all people who have ever lived or will live. After all, there are many members of the human race that,

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if considered, could make humanity ugly. And it is the artist who is respon-sible for this idealization. Comte defi nes art as “an ideal representation of Fact” whose object “is to cultivate our sense of perfection.” 44 By surpassing reality, art stimulates us to amend it. 45 Its function is “to construct types of the noblest kind, by the contemplation of which our feelings and thoughts may be elevated.” 46 Here, Mill follows Comte:

That the ennobling power of this grand conception may have its full effi cacy, we should, with M. Comte, regard the Grand Etre, Humanity, or Mankind, as com-posed, in the past, solely of those who, in every age and variety of position, have played their part worthily in life. It is only as thus restricted that the aggregate of our species becomes an object deserving our veneration. The unworthy members of it are best dismissed from our habitual thoughts; and the imperfections which adhered through life, even to those of the dead who deserve honorable remem-brance, should be no further borne in mind than is necessary not to falsify our conception of facts. 47

The artistic idealization of humanity attempts to draw our attention to the inspiring individuals within it (e.g., Mill notes people such as Socrates and Jesus), while assiduously avoiding any sentimentality or nostalgia, that is, any attempt to indulge our feelings through falsifying humanity.

Second, and relatedly, humanity cannot be a beautiful but distant object of veneration. A richer relationship with humanity is required if it is to motivate us—if it is to cultivate feeling and desire. Humanity, according to Mill, needs to be conceived as participating in a grand epic or drama that has an end or purpose, namely, a Manichean triumph of good over evil. The Religion of Humanity emphasizes the role that the individual has in this epic, namely, how the individual can serve to further the ends of humanity as a whole. Both Comte and Mill took this to be a signifi cant advantage of humanity over God as an object of worship—humanity needs our participation and help, whereas an omnipotent God presumably needs nothing from us.

Mill describes how this conception of humanity changes our sense of our own lives; it offers us a new context for evaluation, deliberation, and action:

As M. Comte truly says, the highest minds, even now, live in thought with the great dead, far more than with the living; and, next to the dead, with those ideal human beings yet to come, whom they are never destined to see. If we honour as we ought those who have served mankind in the past, we shall feel that we are also working for those benefactors by serving that to which their lives were devoted. And when refl ection, guided by history, has taught us the intimacy of the connexion of every age of humanity with every other, making us see in the earthly destiny of mankind the playing out of a great drama, or the action of a prolonged epic, all the genera-tions of mankind become indissolubly united into a single image, combining all

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the power over the mind of the idea of Posterity, with our best feelings towards the living world which surrounds us, and towards the predecessors who have made us what we are. 48

Two things I would note about this passage. First, Mill emphasizes that humanity appears as a unifi ed multiplicity rather than a mere aggregation by being situated within a narrative. Humanity has a life story, as it were, and that story tends toward the fulfi llment of a destiny or purpose (the triumph of good over evil). By presenting humanity in this way, it becomes possible to “live in thought with the great dead” because one’s activities, though on the surface very different from those of the admirable people of the past, can be construed as necessary for playing a role in the same drama of humanity. One does not simply speak and do; one has lines and a part. Thus, the cravings met by the drama of traditional Christianity (e.g., the story of Christ and of the activities of a transcendent God) are now to be addressed by a new, humanist drama (e.g., the story of humanity’s progress).

Second, the importance of providing people with this new, naturalistic, grand narrative is that it promises an antidote to some of the existential diseases cultivated by industrial modernity (an antidote that, unlike tradi-tional religion, does not have the potential to do more harm than the original disease). It promises to combat emptiness, selfi shness, and alien-ation by satisfying our craving for inspiring self-descriptions and by culti-vating fellow-feeling with others.

To summarize: taking one’s life to be a work of art is important as a remedy to pernicious effects of industrial modernity and as an alternative to traditional religion. For Mill, Comte’s Religion of Humanity, which situ-ates the individual life within the epic or drama of an idealized humanity, offers a blueprint for describing life naturalistically in a sustainable and attractive way—a way that by enabling one “to rise above known reality, into a more attractive or a more majestic world,” promotes individual hap-piness (through richer self-descriptions and better subsequent conduct) and the development of character traits (for example, greater fellow-feeling) that increase general utility. Our lives become works of art both in the sense of being objects that can be aesthetically appreciated and in the sense of being artifi cial, that is, the result of human labor.

3. Promoting Life as Art

But how is the promise of the Religion of Humanity to be actualized? How are the crucial changes in how we describe ourselves—and thereby in how we describe the contexts in which we evaluate, deliberate, and act—to be

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realized? How, in other words, are we to turn our lives into works of art? Mill never offers an answer to these questions in any one place, though he does provide hints. It seems that four different factors, at minimum, pro-mote (or diminish) the likelihood that we adopt the sort of self-descriptions Mill favors. These factors are (1) social, economic, and political institutions, (2) periodical literature/newspapers, (3) the teaching of history, and (4) the “poetical and artistic.” I will discuss each in turn in order to make Mill’s commitments more palpable and in order to connect them more clearly to his broader social, economic, and political program.

A. Institutions

Perhaps the most important and far-reaching way in which we are brought to higher regions of thought and feeling is through appropriate “habitual employment”—how we work, how we conduct ourselves in family life, how we relate to the political community as vestryman, as juryman, or as elec-tor. 49 Institutions such as the family and the workplace operate as schools—of sympathy, moral development, and virtue. They thereby do more than fulfi ll specifi ed social functions (e.g., keeping social order, dis-tributing wealth); they educate and shape the individuals who participate in them. Mill’s attention to the impact of institutions on character (and on utility “in the largest sense”) is one of the reasons why he wrote so often on social and political reform.

Mill’s discussion of workplace reform illustrates how the ways in which institutions structure habitual employments affect, for better and worse, our ways of looking at the world and ourselves. 50 In his essay on the historian Michelet, Mill praises the monastic associations of Italy and France after the reforms of St. Benedict: “Unlike the useless communities of contem-plative ascetics in the East, they were diligent in tilling the earth and fabri-cating useful products; they knew and taught that temporal work may also be a spiritual exercise.” 51 The transformation of temporal work into spiritual exercise is one of Mill’s most basic goals for reform of the workplace.

In order for this transformation to take place, industrial work required fundamental reorganization. Ordinarily, wage labor promotes opposition and hostility. The workers and capitalists are given little reason to work together. Mill suggests that there is a way out of this opposition, such that “the civilizing and improving infl uences of association, and the effi ciency and economy of production on a large scale, may be obtained without dividing the producers into two parties with hostile interests and feelings, the many who do the work being mere servants under the command of the one who supplies the funds, and having no interest of their own in the enterprise except to earn their wages with as little labour as possible.” 52 In

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order to achieve economic productivity and spiritual uplift, relations involving dependency must be replaced with those based on cooperation and shared interests. There are two possible arrangements of the workplace that promise to achieve these goals and to combine the best features of capitalism and socialism: associations of capitalists with laborers and asso-ciations of laborers among themselves.

The fi rst form of partnership—more readily available though less desirable—involves tying workers and capitalists together through sharing profi ts. Mill cites whaling ships and Cornish miners as examples, but his favorite case study is that of a Paris housepainter (M. Leclaire), who pub-lished an 1842 pamphlet detailing his method. The conduct of Leclaire’s workforce disturbed him. The workers often showed little interest in the quality or speed with which they labored. He fi rst attempted to address the situation by raising wages. Though this minimized worker turnover, Leclaire discovered that unless he continued to superintend every aspect of the work, he could not depend on his employees to do a good job. His solu-tion was to interest his painters in the quality of their work by having them share in the profi ts. He made each painter, in other words, a limited partner in the business. 53

The second form of industrial partnership, organized by the guiding principle that it exists not for the “mere private benefi t of the individual members, but for the promotion of the co-operative cause,” entails the collective ownership of the capital (an idea found in the writings of Owen and Louis Blanc). 54 James Mill’s good friend, the radical organizer and tailor Francis Place, had organized some worker cooperatives, so perhaps Mill had been inspired by his example. 55 This industrial cooperative com-bines economic advantages, including the prospect of greater productivity than one fi nds in traditional fi rms, with moral ones. 56 These latter comprise “the healing of the standing feud between capital and labour; the transfor-mation of human life, from a confl ict of classes struggling for opposite interests, to a friendly rivalry in the pursuit of a good common to all; the elevation of the dignity of labour; a new sense of security and independence in the labouring class; and the conversion of each human being’s daily occupation into a school of the social sympathies and the practical intelligence.” 57

Mill didn’t think contemporary laborers were completely fi t for industrial cooperatives given their education and level of moral development. Such cooperatives remained a long-term objective to be achieved by steps. Included among the steps was the institution of limited partnerships. Until the middle of the nineteenth century such arrangements were actually made impossible by English law because any sharing of profi ts or investing of capital meant a sharing of liability up to all of one’s assets. Mill’s strong

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advocacy for industrial partnerships, and his belief that they could ulti-mately improve the worker’s “tone of mind,” brought him to lobby for the passage of a number of pro-partnership laws. This lobbying included offering expert testimony to Parliament on a number of occasions. 58

Through a reorganization of economic institutions and practices, then, Mill hoped to turn workers from competitors into collaborators. Along with economic and political benefi ts (e.g., greater stability), industrial coopera-tives promised to affect how the workers looked at their lives and their rela-tions to others. It offered practice describing others as fellow participants in a larger project, thereby improving the reach of the workers’ imaginations and bringing them closer to being able to realize the ideals of the Religion of Humanity. Other reforms in the family and in political and civil society contributed to the same ends.

B. Periodical Literature/Newspapers

Throughout his career, Mill published frequently in the important review periodicals of the period (e.g., the Whig Edinburgh Review , and the radical Westminster Review ). He also edited the London Review (later the London and Westminster Review ). Part of his involvement in the reviews can be accounted for by his sense that their infl uence contributed to elevating or degrading the national “tone.” In his “Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on History”, Mill contrasts the English and Continental minds by appeal to “their respective literatures” and suggests that the higher tone of the Continental mind can be explained by the pervasiveness of the idea, reminiscent of the Religion of Humanity, that history has a destination:

Certain conceptions of history considered as a whole, some notions of a progres-sive unfolding of the capabilities of humanity—of a tendency of man and society towards some distant result—of a destination, as it were, of humanity—pervade, in its whole extent, the popular literature of France. Every newspaper, every literary review or magazine, bears witness of such notions. They are always turning up accidentally, when the writer is ostensibly engaged with something else; or show-ing themselves as a background behind the opinions which he is immediately maintaining. When the writer’s mind is not of a high order, these notions are crude and vague; but they are evidentiary of a tone of thought which has prevailed so long among the superior intellects, as to have spread from them to others, and become the general property of the nation. 59

If one wants to encourage a poetic attitude about life, then, one must pay careful attention to the vehicles for the dissemination of what becomes public opinion. Mill never suggests that coercive tactics be employed to cre-ate better periodicals and newspapers. Rather, he attempts to persuade his fellow intellectuals to attend more carefully to the ideas of history and of

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humanity implicit (and sometimes explicit) in their writings. Given Mill’s belief that ideas and intellectuals can be motive forces in history, we should not be surprised by his view that popular literature can contribute to raise the people “above known reality, into a more attractive or a more majestic world”—one in which human life has a noble purpose. 60

C. Teaching History

Together with the potential impact of periodical literature and newspapers, Mill considers the infl uence of university professors, particularly profes-sors of history. He consistently speaks of history not simply as a theoretical pursuit but as a subject that can cultivate us as ethical beings. He treats it as a form of paideia. In the “Inaugural Address,” Mill contends that a pro-fessor of history has a responsibility to present his subject in a manner that encourages students’ imaginative engagement. The goal is

to make him [the student] take interest in history not as a mere narrative, but as a chain of causes and effects still unwinding itself before his eyes, and full of momentous consequences to himself and his descendants; the unfolding of a great epic or dramatic action, to terminate in the happiness or misery, the elevation or degradation, of the human race; an unremitting confl ict between good and evil powers, of which every act done by any of us, insignifi cant as we are, forms one of the incidents; a confl ict in which even the smallest of us cannot escape from taking part, in which whoever does not help the right side is helping the wrong, and for our share in which, whether it be greater or smaller, and let its actual consequences be visible or in the main invisible, no one of us can escape the responsibility. 61

Along with providing a mission statement that must make professors of history tremble, this lofty Manichean/Zoroastrian version of history and of the nature of human progress reveals how earnestly Mill believed in the goals embodied in the Religion of Humanity and in the ideal of life as art. 62 History, properly taught, encourages the student to see his smallest activ-ities as having world-historical relevance. It is precisely the kind of spirit that, for Mill and other nineteenth-century intellectuals, is absent from the common English sensibility.

D. The “Poetical and Artistic”

The fi nal vehicle for cultivating the poetic attitude at the core of the Religion of Humanity is what Mill terms the “poetical and artistic.” This includes not just poetry and the fi ne arts but also the “poetic” aspects of other kinds of writing. Plato, Demosthenes, and Tacitus, are all given as examples of authors whose poetic writing in history, rhetoric, and philosophy “brings home to us all those aspects of life which take hold of our nature on its

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unselfi sh side, and lead us to identify our joy and grief with the good or ill of the system of which we form a part.” 63 Once again, the individual is brought to see herself in relation to a larger system of which she forms a part and in which she plays a role.

This emphasis of Mill’s hearkens to debates from the early to mid-nineteenth century about the ameliorating effects of the fi ne arts on the British people (particularly the laboring classes). The opening of the National Gallery in the early 1820s coincided with a growing belief in the moral utility of museums, parks, monuments, and other public places. Such facilities countered the effects of “gin palaces” and eased political ten-sions by softening manners and reducing anger. It was therefore taken to be important to increase the number of, and access to, museums and like public spaces. 64

4. Further Considerations

Through exploring a wide variety of Mill’s writings on aesthetics, history, religion, politics, and economics, I have striven both to link disparate parts of his corpus and to make Mill’s commitment to that portion of the Art of Life addressing “the Beautiful or Noble . . . in human conduct and works” more concrete—less a gesture or metaphor and more a philosophical and moral program open to evaluation. I began by suggesting that art gained particular importance as a remedy for the problems of industrial moder-nity, which fostered indifference to the public and a conception of our-selves as having lives and interests that have little connection to the lives and interests of others. One fl awed remedy had traditionally come from religion, but Mill wants to provide a naturalistic alternative. In so doing, he wants to discover a type of poetic self-description that is sustainable and that meets the important goal of ameliorating the effects of industrial modernity by providing a richer meaning for individual lives, encouraging the development of individuality, and cultivating sympathy and fellow-feeling.

I went on to argue that this new form of self-description gets expressed in the Religion of Humanity, which promises to show the individual life as beautiful and noble through situating that life in the drama or epic of humanity, in which an idealized humanity commits itself to the Manichean victory of good over evil. This self-description is meant to change the con-texts relevant for deliberation, evaluation, and action.

I subsequently offered some ways in which Mill hoped to promote and sustain this way of looking at our lives: economic, political, and social reform; the tone of public discourse; education; and the arts. I would like to

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conclude by discussing some of the broader historical and philosophical insights offered by this investigation.

A. Therapeutic Philosophy

A large part of what it means to foster the development of utilitarian agents and a society that promotes happiness is to encourage the individuals within that society to see themselves as connected to others such that they care about how things turn out for them. It means, in other words, having a society in which people recognize shared destinies and in which they pos-sess, as Mill puts it in Utilitarianism , “the feeling of unity” with others. 65

Mill’s interest in fostering utilitarian agents connects his ethical thought to therapeutic traditions in moral philosophy. Like the Stoics, who provided students with pithy sayings that were meant to be repeated over the course of the day in order to create improved cognitive habits, Mill emphasizes creating new descriptive frameworks for the self, in which individuals perceive themselves as part of something larger and more important. Individuals achieve this new self-description—they perceive their lives aesthetically—less through active adoption of the techniques of a philosophical school, and more by absorbing lessons embedded in art, peri-odicals, and practices, including those within institutions such as the family and the workplace. Only this absorption offers the promise of sustainable and large-scale change of the kind essential for promoting utilitarian ends. It thereby indicates Mill’s sensitivity (greater than that of the Stoics) to the limitations of agency and to the impact of circumstance.

B. Humanism

Though a number of intellectual traditions identify selfi shness as a press-ing moral and political problem, Mill ultimately rejects the relative parochi-alism found in, for instance, forms of classical republicanism. That is, republican theory tends to emphasize subordinating individual interests to the common good (something Mill also emphasizes), but that common good is understood as the good of the state, rather than as the good of humanity as a whole. Generally, Mill wants individuals to value the good of the state, but if the good of the state and of humanity ever confl ict, he favors the latter in a way that most classical republicans would have found puzzling. Mill is, in this respect, clearly a humanist.

One of the things brought out by the preceding analysis is that Mill’s humanism rests on a rather interesting ground. What is supposed to link us with others? Mill rejects religious narratives, parochial bonds of nation or tribe, and deeply metaphysical foundations (e.g., shared rational agency), in favor of a kind of imagined cosmopolitan community.

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It is noteworthy how much Mill shares with another form of antimeta-physical humanism: that expressed in Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity . Rorty follows Mill and others in foregrounding the need for “the feeling of unity.” And he argues, like Mill, that the process of coming to see others as “one of us” rather than as “them” is “a matter of detailed descrip-tion of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as eth-nography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel.” Rorty describes this as a turn “against theory and toward narrative,” which nicely captures the status of the “epic” of Humanity in Mill’s thought. 66

A key difference between them, however, is in the ultimate ground of the feeling of solidarity. Rorty opts for a less grandiose foundation than Mill, namely, the recognition of shared suffering:

In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away “prejudice” or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagina-tion, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by refl ection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. 67

Nothing in Mill’s view would rule out the contribution of a shared potential for pain and humiliation as a ground for solidarity. Nevertheless, the ground he hopes for is a richer one, namely, imagining others not princi-pally as fellow sufferers but as fellow workers engaged in furthering the ends of humanity—prominent among which is the ultimate victory of good over evil. This, of course, strikes many contemporary humanists as, to put it bluntly, bizarre. This difference between Mill and Rorty concerning the kinds of descriptions that provide the best foundation for human solidarity remains a subject worth investigating more closely (though I won’t do it here). Does Mill’s brand of humanism, even if it embodies a kind of naiveté that we reject, show us that something is lost by grounding humanism and cosmopolitanism on the capacity for shared suffering?

C. Mill and Modern Political Epicureanism

Finally, Mill’s philosophical ambition, as refl ected in his views on life as art, comes out not just in the ground for humanism but in his conception of political and social reform. In the Autobiography , Mill notes that after his break with Benthamite utilitarianism, he began to see “the choice of political institutions as a moral and educational question more than one of material interests, thinking that it ought to be decided mainly by the consideration,

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what great improvement in life and culture stands next in order for the people concerned, as the condition of their further progress, and what insti-tutions are most likely to promote that.” 68 As we’ve seen, evaluating social, economic, and political institutions by attention to their moral and educational effects plays a prominent role in promoting the end of taking life as art.

When Mill is placed within the context of a specifi c tradition in moral and political philosophy, he is most often associated with Epicureanism, because of both his hedonism and his views about justice. 69 I would note, however, that Mill’s emphasis on the importance of seeing the choice of political institutions as, in a full sense, centrally involving moral and educational considerations refl ects an important respect in which Mill breaks with the dominant modern appropriation of Epicurean thought in political philosophy.

That Epicurean tradition generally includes a rather pessimistic anthropology that emphasizes the power of passions in determining human conduct. This pessimistic anthropology, found in political thinkers such as Hobbes, Pufendorf, Thomasius, Mandeville, and Bentham, frequently gets translated into limited goals for politics. In particular, these philosophers tend to reject the tradition of state-craft as soul-craft. Politics focuses prin-cipally on the external, including the prevention of violent conduct and the satisfaction of material needs. Bentham expresses such an antiperfection-ist, this-worldly sensibility in his essay “Of the Infl uence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation”: “Let us seek only for what is attainable: it pres-ents a career suffi ciently vast for genius; suffi ciently diffi cult for the exercise of the greatest virtues. We shall never make this world the abode of perfect happiness: when we shall have accomplished all that can be done, this par-adise will be, according to the Asiatic idea, only a garden; but this garden will be a most delightful abode, compared with the savage forest in which men have so long wandered.” 70 This sensibility gets refl ected in Bentham’s general disdain for haughty philosophy that offers to make us better: “While Xenophon was writing History, and Euclid teaching Geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense, on pretence of teaching morality and wisdom. This morality of theirs consisted in words.” 71

As seen from Mill’s treatment of the theme of life as art, however, soul-craft is very much up for consideration when thinking about political, economic, and social reform. In this respect, one could imagine Mill’s cri-tique of Bentham paralleling one of Leibniz’s criticisms of Pufendorf, namely, that Pufendorf’s conception of politics is too thin—politics should concern itself with “that which remains hidden in the soul, and does not appear externally.” 72 Mill’s liberalism remains bound up with robust ideals for human life.

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notes

1. Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill , 255. Nicholas Capaldi, in his John Stuart Mill , ends his preface with the different, though related, claim that Mill “con-structed a life that strove to be a Romantic work of art.”

2. Mill, System of Logic , CW , 8:949. 3. Mill, “Inaugural Address,” CW , 21:256. 4. Mill, On Liberty , CW , 18:263. 5. Mill, “Inaugural Address,” CW , 21:244 . 6. Ibid. , 255 . 7. For relevant discussion of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, see the follow-

ing: Crafts, “Some Dimensions of the ‘Quality of Life’ during the British Industrial Revolution”; Crafts, “Forging Ahead and Falling Behind: The Rise and Relative Decline of the First Industrial Nation”; Feinstein, “Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution.” The population of England and Wales doubled from 1780 to 1830, and that increased population was more and more commonly found in cities. Rural population in Britain fell from 71 per-cent in 1821 to 56 percent in 1851, even though the nation, at the end of the eighteenth century, was already twice as urbanized as France. By 1870, the percentage of labor in agriculture had dropped to 22.7 percent, half of what it had been in 1780, and a fi gure not reached in the United States until the 1920s and in Germany until the 1950s. Moreover, and connected to the urbanization, though there was a moderate increase in real wages and GDP per capita, there was also from 1830 to 1850 a decrease in life expectancy, an increase in infant mortality, and a decrease in average height, which is an indicator of overall health.

8. Mill, “Civilization,” CW , 18:120. 9. Mill, “Coleridge,” CW , 10:123.

10. Mill, “Civilization,” CW , 18:119 . 11. Ibid. , 169 . Compare this to what Engels has to say in The Condition of the

Working Class in England in 1844:

The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds and thousands of all classes and ranks crowd-ing past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indiffer-ence, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellant and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.” (295)

12. See Sussman, Victorians and the Machine , and Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? 313–14. For the growth of the cultural centrality of the machine in the eighteenth century, see Stewart, “A Meaning for Machines.”

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13. Attention to this theme helps explain why Mill ends On Liberty by contrasting the development of individuality in a society with the interests of those who govern and want to have the “machine . . . work more smoothly” ( CW , 18:305).

14. Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 40–41. One can also fi nd this criticism famously realized in Dickens’ Mr. Gradgrind of Hard Times , and Matthew Arnold’s later Culture and Anarchy where he speaks of “the believer in machinery” as an enemy of culture and where he situates Bentham in the vanguard of the Philistines (in other words, the van-guard of the middle classes). For further discussion of the Victorian metaphor of the mechanical as it relates to Mill, see my “Mill, Bentham, and ‘Internal Culture’.”

15. Mill, Autobiography , CW , 1:161. 16. Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties.” It should be noted that this essay

appears originally in the fi rst edition of Dissertations and Discussions (1859), combining, with very little alteration, two earlier essays from 1833, “What Is Poetry?” and “The Two Kinds of Poetry.”

17. The concern about the effects of urbanization led many to turn to art for rem-edies. In his 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads , Wordsworth contends that one of the best things a writer can do is to enlarge the capacity of the human mind to experience excite-ment “without the application of gross and violent stimulants” (248). The ongoing change from an agrarian to an industrial society in England made this service all the more important:

For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfi tting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifi es. (249)

18. Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” CW , 1:345 . 19. Ibid . 20. As an example of this tendency see Mill, “Sedgwick’s Discourse,” CW , 10:56;

and “Bentham,” 10:97–98. 21. Mill, “James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind,” preface

and editorial notes, CW , 31:224. I should also note that Mill rather undersells the value of Alison’s treatise on art. It still very much rewards close study.

Mill had a very high opinion of Ruskin’s intellect as one can see in his January 21, 1854, diary entry: “It is long since there has been an age of which it could be said, as truly as of this, that nearly all the writers, even the good ones, were but commentators: expanders and appliers of ideas borrowed from others. Among those of the present time I can think only of two (now that Carlyle has written himself out, and become a mere commentator on himself) who seem to draw what they say from a source within them-selves: and to the practical doctrines and tendencies of both these, there are the gravest objections. Comte, on the Continent; in England (ourselves excepted) I can only think of Ruskin.” (“Diary,” CW , 27:645). Though they continued to have their disagreements, in the 1860s, Ruskin recommended Mill for his seat in Parliament.

22. Ruskin, Modern Painters , 29 . 23. Ibid. , 38 . 24. Ibid. , 40 . 25. This view about beauty led Ruskin to practice and recommend a close, and

often laborious, rendering of natural things. The idea that God could be found in the

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details led to, among other things, a wealth of beautiful studies of single leafs and fl owers, and it inspired the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

26. Ruskin, Modern Painters , 2. 27. Mill, “James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind,” preface

and editorial notes, CW , 31:223 . 28. Ibid. , 224–25 . 29. Ibid. , 225 . 30. Ibid. , 226 . 31. Though Mill speaks of divine perfection with much more reticence than

Ruskin, the operative general principles are the same. 32. “James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind,” preface and

editorial notes, CW , 31:226. 33. These passages, which have been sadly ignored in the continually growing

number of articles on the higher/lower pleasure distinction, could eventually, I believe, help clear up some of the discussions about it. Susan Feagin has made one of the only serious attempts to incorporate Mill’s aesthetics and the passages in the Analysis into a reading of higher and lower pleasures (see “Mill and Edwards on the Higher Pleasures”).

34. For an excellent account of Bentham’s views on religion, see Crimmins, Secular Utilitarianism .

35. Some helpful discussions of Mill on religion include Britton, “John Stuart Mill on Christianity”; Millar, “Mill on Religion”; Ryan, J. S. Mill ; and Linda Raeder, John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity .

36. Mill, “Utility of Religion,” CW , 10:422–25. 37. Mill, “Utility of Religion,” CW , 10:419. 38. Carlyle, Past and Present , 202–3. 39. Mill, “Utility of Religion,” CW , 10:419 . 40. Ibid . 41. Ibid. , 419 –20 . 42. Ibid. , 420 . 43. Ibid . 44. Comte, A General View of Positivism , 300 . 45. Ibid. , 302 . 46. Ibid . 47. Mill, “Auguste Comte and Positivism,” CW , 10:334 . 48. Ibid . (italics mine). 49. Mill, “De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [II],” CW , 18:169. 50. One could just as easily use as illustrations the analyses of social life in On

Liberty or of the family in The Subjection of Women . 51. Mill, “Michelet’s History of France,” CW , 20:240. 52. Mill, Principles of Political Economy , CW , 3:768–69 . 53. Ibid. , 772–73 . 54. Ibid. , 783 . 55. See Capaldi, John Stuart Mill , 20. 56. One essential difference between Mill and other socialists of the period is that

Mill took competition to be a morally useful stimulus to activity. Thus it is important to Mill that industrial cooperatives be able to out-compete traditional fi rms in the market-place. Mill was not sure that such cooperatives would out-compete traditional fi rms—the sample size was too small—but he hoped that they would.

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57. Mill, Principles of Political Economy , CW , 3:792. 58. The most relevant occasion is from 1850, Mill, see “The Savings of the Middle

and Working Classes.” 59. Mill, “Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on History,” CW , 20:260–61. See also

Mill’s essay on Coleridge, in which he claims that the series of writers and thinkers from Herder to Michelet “by making the facts and events of the past have a meaning and an intelligible place in the gradual evolution of humanity, have at once given history, even to the imagination, an interest like romance” (“Coleridge,” CW , 10:39).

60. Mill, “James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind,” preface and editorial notes, CW , 31:226.

61. Mill, “Inaugural Address,” CW , 21:244. 62. This historical Manicheanism should be distinguished from the more meta-

physically robust religious Manicheanism, for which the evidence is “too shadowy and unsubstantial” (Mill, “Utility of Religion,” CW , 10:425).

63. Mill, “Inaugural Address,” CW , 21:254. 64. For discussion of these points, see Hoock, “Reforming Culture: National Art

Institutions in the Age of Reform.” 65. Mill, Utilitarianism , CW , 10:227. 66. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity , xvi . 67. Ibid . 68. Mill, Autobiography , CW , 1:177. 69. The most illuminating example in the secondary literature of which I am

aware is Frederick Rosen’s recent Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill (London: Routledge, 2003).

70. Bentham, “Essay on the Infl uence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation,” 194.

71. Jeremy Bentham, Deontology Together with a Table of the Springs of Action and the Article on Utilitarianism , 135.

72. Leibniz, Political Writings, 68.

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Mill, Life as Art, and Problems of Self-Description in an Industrial Age

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